Steady now, let’s resist being overwhelmed by smugness. Brain drains to U.S. universities are nothing new.

The globalization of universities means there is intellectual motion in many directions, most recently toward China.

The French have been coming for a long time: Michel Foucault, who did stints at U.C. Berkeley in the 80's, Jacques Derrida, who pontificated at U.C. Irvine for years before his death, and Olivier Zunz, firmly ensconced at Virginia for decades.

But it goes the other way too. Berkeley has just lost the Nobel prize-winning astrophysicist George Smoot to Paris; my brother, an eminent biochemist, is at Jena; Lorraine Daston, a historian of science, runs an institute in Berlin; Peter Mandler – erstwhile Californian – is at Cambridge. Richard Sennett decamped from New York to London.

And within Europe, British universities have long been soaking up all the talented, English-proficient, but domestically unemployable products of German universities. The faculty of the ETH Zurich (Europe’s M.I.T.) is well over half foreign-born, while only 5 percent of Stanford’s is. So let’s not exaggerate the direction of the flows.

But it is not just a question of brain drain, in whatever direction – a kind of great sucking noise emitted by the chattering classes. What is going on here is the increasing globalization of the universities. We are used to it already in the corporate world: careers start in Delft and end in Delhi without anyone blinking an eye.

But in the meantime, the university world too has developed to the point where the nationalist and protectionist instincts of yore have broken down. Above all, the rise of English as the lingua franca -- in both research and teaching -- means that scholars can go anywhere without being burdened by the need to retool linguistically, or forever be Dr. Strangeloves professing in heavy accents.

The Scandinavian universities – otherwise cursed by obscure languages – function in large measure in English at all levels, at least in those fields that are not wholly Scando-centric. British historians write books on German history that are best-sellers in the country of their focus.

And, of course, Chinese scientists are for the first time returning to their own country in massive numbers, giving up even cushy jobs in the U.S. for the chance to run huge institutes with gargantuan budgets and national importance. Reciprocity is the key concept here, a kind of intellectual Brownian motion across the globe, rather than any unidirectional draining away.